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on a bed of nails
A part of her knows that she has a couple of options. The other, larger part, knows that she doesn’t have any but the one.
So she throws herself on his - and by extension - their mercy.
Unfortunately, the FBIs mercy is a very, very thin strip of land and she almost fucks up the landing when she stumbles out of the forest, onto the grounds of St. Edward’s and into the arms of the agents assigned to keep an eye on Henry.
So the first thing her little brother sees when she comes back into his life after what might have been the worst two days of both of their lives is Paige getting handcuffed by a burly man while a thin-lipped woman points a gun at her. Then he sees them throw her into the back of a car.
She does not get to speak to him.
She doesn’t pray, doesn’t even believe, anymore, but this time she does.
****
“When can I see Henry?” is the first sentence she says. She resolved that it will be the only one she says until she does see him, or Stan, or Dennis.
Her resolve breaks fairly quickly, unfortunately.
It’s the pictures from Chicago that do it.
They spread them out on the table in front of her. She takes one look and throws up, vomits up the last bits of food she found in Claudia’s apartment and bile, and tries very hard not to cry.
They switch interrogation rooms after that. The metal of the handcuffs is cold against her wrists, and almost an anchor.
She tells them most of what she knows, after. She keeps their names, their real ones, Mischa and Nadezhda, to herself, and the names in their passports and their disguises - “We separated before we put them on. So we couldn’t tell if one of us got captured.” She knows that if the FBI figures that out, she’s definitely going to jail, not just probably, but it’s a risk she’s taking. Two days might not be long enough for them to make it home.
She doesn’t want to sell out everything and everyone. She’s not an American.
***
They let her go, with the command attached to keep herself available for further questioning. She stands outside, on the sidewalk, in the sun that’s unveiled between some quick moving winter clouds and just stands and stands and stands.
In the pocket of her jacket, she’s rubbing her thumb and index finger against one another.
Stan doesn’t come out to talk to her. Neither does Dennis.
So she goes home after a little while. Home-home, to Claudia’s apartment. Or maybe not Claudia’s apartment, maybe just their meeting-apartment, but anyway, it’s home. It’s the place where her mother was the most truthful with her, though of course it’s also not. Still. It’s home, in a way.
She sleeps for almost two days straight.
***
Two more days go by, and nobody comes for her. Not the FBI, but also not the Russians. Which is is weird, because she expected them. Expected them at Henry’s school already, if she’s honest, expected them to come for her because they told her to keep herself available, expected them to demand she follow their plan, expected them to throw her in jail, expected them to cut her off like the loose end she’d be if she didn’t, expected -
Expected something. But there’s nothing.
It does make sense, in a way. She's an American citizen, probably, after all, born to pretend-American parents on American soil, who helped her parents. Can that really be considered spying?
And parts - large parts - of the KGB tried to move against Gorbachev, and her parents foiled it, so the Russians must be in uproar. Warring factions and all that. A girl might slip through the cracks.
Especially with the FBI keeping an eye on said girl.
Even if FBI isn't arresting her.
So no one comes for her.
She’s relieved. She’s not sure what she would have done if they did. Just gone to jail, quietly, because she lacked the money for an attorney? Or otten an internship at the State Department? As if. She couldn’t have, after everything. Which is good, in a way, because it means she doesn’t have to ask herself if she would have wanted to.
But still. She expected them to come for her.
So when no one does...
She‘s lost.
***
She ends up at FBI headquarters, unsurprisingly enough. Asking for permission to drive up to New Hampshire to see Henry.
Everyone’s very surprised by it somehow, and it takes a while, some meetings, some discussions that she spends sitting on a bench in some nondescript hallway, a woman next to her even when she goes to pee, stall door open just a bit, and then they let her go.
To say that it goes badly is the understatement of the century.
***
Henry takes a swing at her. Out on the lawn, in front of everyone, and Paige reacts on instinct more than anything, kneeing him in the stomach and wrapping her arm around his neck, putting him in a headlock, and then she realises what she just did and drops him immediately, as if he burned her.
Henry coughs and sputters, tears in his eyes, and curses, calls her a bitch and a cunt and worse. She hears it, barely, through the ringing in her ears and the bellowing voice of the FBI agents that pulled their gun on her, and the hammering of her own heart.
They put her in handcuffs again after that.
***
It’s not what she imagined, the after.
Then again, she didn’t imagine much in those few seconds it took to step off the train.
Such a small step. Just a few inches of free space between the train and the platform. She stepped across it like it was nothing.
It was everything.
It was nothing.
It’s not what she imagined.
***
She cuts her hair. And dyes it. Buys glasses, not an exact copy of the ones she wore that night, but close enough.
It’s an impulse decision, but when she looks in the mirror - looks at her face and knows it’s almost the same as it was when her parents saw it for the last time - it feels right.
It feels almost something like good. But not quite.
***
She waits a week. She can’t wait longer than that. Then she goes back up to New Hampshire.
She doesn’t step foot on the school grounds, just waits right at the edge. She knows Henry will know, will be told.
He doesn’t come out to see her.
She stays there until nightfall. Then she goes home, waits another week, comes back.
***
His voice is the same.
That’s not a surprise, except in a way it is. It’s still comforting, a known thing, a tether to her old life from which everything else is gone.
***
“Oh wow. This - this is unexpected, Paige.”
She can’t help but smile against the phone. “How’s Buenos Aires, Pastor?”
“Uh - good. It’s good.”
Silence.
“But I’m guessing that’s not why you’re calling.”
Silence. Then -
“It’s not. You’re right, it’s not.” She sighs. “I - we - they - they - our cover got blown. They’re gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?”
She bites her lower lip. Rubs thumb and index finger together. “They went back. Home. To Russia.”
“What, and they just left you? And Henry?”
“They didn’t want to! And they didn’t. Leave me, I mean. I left. I decided to stay.”
There’s another silence. Shorter this time. “That must have been a very hard decision.”
Paige looks out of the window. Thinks about cooking zarkoye, about getting drunk with her mother and Claudia, about her mother’s laughter, about her father putting her in a headlock, about him putting a blanket over her and kissing her forehead.
“It was. And - I don’t know, it also wasn’t, you know? I couldn’t just leave Henry.”
I didn’t even say goodbye to him, she thinks. But doesn’t say.
“So - how are you now?” Pastor Tim asks.
***
Dennis comes by, a few days after that.
She’s in Claudia’s living room, sparring with a bag of dirty clothes hung from the ceiling, getting her anger, her nervous energy out. It’s all she does now, all she’s done for the past eight weeks since Rousses Point. Spar and sleep and cook solyanka and zarkoye and go up to New Hamsphire and stand out in the cold until it gets dark to wait for Henry, except during winter break. During winter break, she just sleeps.
And then Dennis walks in. Doesn’t even knock, just steps into the room.
“Hello, Paige.”
“Hi.”
***
They’re not charging her.
They’ve got enough on her, he makes that very clear, enough to put her away for a very, very long time, and if they did, they would never trade her for anything or anyone.
They're not charging her, though.
But they’re not done surveilling her.
“We’re convinced - for now - that you really did stay back for Henry, and for Henry alone. But if you didn’t - if you stayed for some other reason, for some mission or other, and if you ever think it’s the right time - it‘s not. It won’t ever be.” His mouth is a thin, angry line. “Just so we’re clear on that.”
She nods. They eye each other across the room.
Then she walks to the freezer, gets out a bottle of vodka, gets two glasses and pours. Then she sits down.
He doesn't say anything about it, about her drinking, just takes the shot, easily, as if he’s done it a million times.
He does not sit down opposite of her.
***
She starts reading again, after that. Marx, the book she got from Pastor Tim, and then Marx and Engels after that, then Engels, then Lenin. She gets the books from the library because it doesn’t matter now and devours them, one after the other.
She doesn’t call Pastor Tim again. She doesn’t see Dennis again.
She gets a job, in a supermarket, drops out of university. Starts volunteering at a soup kitchen. Goes up to New Hampshire every week. Spars, eats, sleeps.
***
And then, finally, Stan comes by.
“Let’s go for a walk,“ he says.
It’s a horrid afternoon in late February. Not wet but blisteringly cold. The sky is a flat grey expanse.
“Your - the apartment -”
“ - is bugged. I know. “Paige interrupts Stan. “I’m not stupid.” Just naive.
They walk for a bit, in silence. It’s not tense, not really, but it’s also not not tense.
“I - thank you.” She says, finally. “For the parking garage.”
Stan scoffs. She wonders if he regrets it.
“And for telling Henry.”
His face becomes unreadable at that.
“And for everything you did for me.” There’s silence between them again. The wind picks up. “Why - why did you, though?”
He falters for half a step. Then looks at her. Finally, he says: “You’re just a kid.”
Paige would love to scoff at that. Problem is, it’s true.
And it’s also not true. She doesn’t know how many kids her age ran into a forest to find their mom on the floor, face smeared with someone else’s blood and brains.
A suicide, she said.
She’s not sure she believes it. She’s not sure she ever did.
The marine that took her fake student ID, that wanted to force her to meet him for a date, is dead, too.
“It’s - I thought of Matthew, you know.” Stan says after a while. ”When they brought you in, when you threw up all over that interrogation room - I thought of Matthew. Of how it would feel if someone punished him for things I did. Or for things he did for me.”
He’s easy to talk to, she realises suddenly. Despite everything, or maybe because of it. He’s really easy to talk to, and that despite the fact that she was sure she was going to die in that parking garage, or rot in jail.
So she says “I didn’t do it for them, you know. I mean, at the beginning, I did. But it was also me. It was also for me. I - I wanted to do it. I believed in it.” I still believe -, she almost says, but she isn’t even sure what she believes. Just something, in something. Bigger than her, better than any of the things this country is proclaiming to be and showing it’s not.
“Hm.” is all that comes from Stan.
“And - it was true. About Matthew. What I said in the garage. I did just like him.” He eyes her. “I promise. I didn’t say it to - to work you. I swear.” She hesitates for a moment. “They were furious, actually. Mom and Dad. We fought about it. All the time. They thought I couldn’t handle it. Lying to him.”
Their eyes meet.
“This is Paige, Stan,” her mom’s words echo through her mind.
“We had a job to do.”
“Was that part of this? My son?”
“And I couldn’t.” She admits.
Stan nods. They walk along in silence.
She wonders about Renee.
“I don't know how to say this. But I think there's a chance... Renee might be one of us.”
If she is -
- it doesn’t matter.
Instead, she asks: “How - how is Henry?”
“He’s - I don’t know. He doesn’t share that much, you know? Kind of a quiet kid.”
She can’t help but think of Henry working away to get into St. Edwards without sharing until it was essentially a done deal, of Henry playing endlessly, of his fascination with space, all of it tucked away in his quiet little brain, working endlessly. She can’t help but smile.
“But he’s also - angry, you know. Well, of course you know. At you, and at his parents, and at the whole world. And at me.”
“At you?”
“Yeah. For not letting him drop out of school, for trying to talk to him about you, for calling, for asking about his grades, for not calling. You know, teenage stuff.”
He acts nonchalant about it, understanding, but she can tell that it does hurt.
“He’ll come around though. I know he will.”
***
He does. Months later, he finally comes around, and out to where she’s standing, smoking, and hugs her.
She’s picked up smoking. He laughs, teases her about it, tells her that Mom offered him a cigarette once. Thanksgiving, before she had to fly to Houston, the last time he saw her.
He asks her if she knows what they actually did that day.
She tells him a version of the truth. A softer one - one that does include the two dead FBI agains, the dead Russian, but not what they did to Marilyn. She knows that if he ever does find out - finds out she’s still keeping things from him, protecting them, protecting him - there will be hell to pay. She does it anyway.
She wonders if that is how they felt, all this time.
Finally, he asks: “How are you?”
***
She doesn’t know. She hasn’t known for months. She goes to work, she goes to sleep. She eats, she works and she works out, she volunteers. She’s living in the after, or existing in it. In the after of not just her parents being discovered but, more importantly, in the after of those few crucial seconds, the ones where she stepped off the train and onto the platform, back into America.
“I’m okay.” She tells Henry. “Still - still trying to work it all out. To figure out when they were honest and when they were lying.”
“They were lying to you?” Henry asks, eyes wide. “I mean - after. After you found out. They kept lying to you even after?”
“Yeah.” She presses her lips together. “About their missions. About what they were doing, about the - the violence of some of it.” And the deception, and the depth.
Her dad married another woman, for God’s sake.
“I - I kind of get it.” She adds when she sees Henry’s face. She doesn’t know why. “I guess. Like - they - I guess they kind of didn’t want me to think differently of them.”
Henry scoffs. Paige shrugs.
***
She does think differently of them. Of course she does. How couldn’t she?
And at the same time, she doesn’t. How could she?
They’re still her parents. They loved her. They loved Henry. They raised them, they were good to them. They twisted them, they twisted her especially, they twisted themselves, but they did love her.
She loves them.
They made her.
She hates them.
She misses them.
***
She stumbles into it more than anything. It’s the logo that draws her eye - a purple hand holding an orange carrot - and the name. Food Not Bombs.
It’s the people, also, after the first meeting, and then the ideology as well. Once she’s done reading Lenin, she starts with Bakunin.
What would her mom say about that, she wonders.
***
Stan doesn’t say much about it. He’s a quietly supportive presence in her life, meeting her for dinner, inviting her for the holidays, arguing with her. Playfully almost. Respectfully, passionately.
Paying for her to attend her first and last EST seminar, even though it’s got a different name now.
It’s a weird decision, a spur of the moment one, a “I saw a flyer and I got curious” one, much like Food not Bombs.
It helps.
***
“So, how are you?” Henry asks. He’s in the passenger seat of her shitty old car, she’s driving him back up to his dorm up at Yale.
She looks over, and there he is. Not-quite-babyface-anymore against the sunny blue backdrop of rural America.
She loves him.
Of course she does.
She’s proud of him.
Of course she is. Proud, and also a little bitter.
He's going to Yale, and she never graduated. She never even went back. Stan offered to lend her the money. It comes with a condition - absolutely no politics - but she doesn’t mind.
If anything, she’d do social work. But she can’t make herself. She’s not sure why.
She’s living in limbo, in a way. Still suspended in that moment when she stepped off the train, not sure if she can commit fully to being here, not sure if she can leave.
Henry is doing as well as can be expected. Better, even. He’s gotten a good scholarship, he’s got friends, he’s got a girlfriend. He’s popular, even.
He’s all the things she isn’t.
Even though -
"Paige is the smart one, she always works her ass off, and she does everything right."
Yeah, as if.
He’d probably be fine, even if she left now.
But she can’t leave.
Besides, where would she even go?
“I’m fine,” she says. It’s not the truth, not quite. Not yet.
But it’s less of a lie than it used to be.